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Of course you're going to hear supportive friendly things from your friends. It's much harder to tell someone a hard truth if you see them as your friend and wa

Of course you're going to hear supportive friendly things from your friends. It's much harder to tell someone a hard truth if you see them as your friend and want the best for them. Here's a blunt truth. If it's easy for me to ditch your product, your product has no value. 90% of the comments here on HN amounted to "gee, I guess I have to spend an extra 20 minutes configuring Nginx now." Solving 20 minutes of Nginx configuration is not a viable business. System configuration is handled by some Puppet library author. Who's going to spend $100 on your product so they don't have to spend $20 on a non-free SSL certificate? You're friends with the RethinkDB developers? The moral of their story was even if you have a compelling product, even if you have an interesting niche, even if you give it away for free, even if you give away the source code, even if you have features nobody else has, if you are entering a saturated market you are facing a massive, time-consuming, expensive up-hill battle. Moving away from RethinkDB to Postgres is hard. There are things RethinkDB does that Postgres just doesn't do. But people did this anyway instead of paying, instead of contributing. Moving away from Caddy is simple. Your product barely even exists. That's why you're having trouble making money. Solve a real problem and you'll make real money.

rapsey 9y ago
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. A lot of the time experts don't see a market before someone makes a business out of it. It's obviously not going to be the next big IPO. If he can make some money back for his time however, good for him. If his project is useless, people would not get so upset.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud. If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here. This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    > "His differentiator is being easy to install." Not just easy to install. Easy to install, maintain and extend. Those properties clearly have value, not just for those who can't afford to pay licence costs. The idea there's no market for Caddy is clearly false. As referenced in the linked article, there are already uses of it in commercial organisations, something you're suggesting can't possibly exist as "Nginx and Apache already own that market". The only criticisms I'd make is that the price is too high (in my opinion) and there should've been prior warning given before switching to a paid model, so that companies could budget for it in advance. However, that doesn't mean they won't have paying customers. Note that they've already got commercial sponsors.
    - AndyNemmity 9y ago
      Price being too high is an interesting question. I've found that people willing to pay, will pay a high price. You don't really gain anything putting it any lower. Those that want it free or else stay the same. Maybe others have different experiences...
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        Consider what's cheaper, paying for Caddy under its current pricing structure or paying for a consultant to configure NGINX? If the key selling point of Caddy is that it makes web hosting easier to manage, but you can get around that cost by paying a one-off cost for someone to set up a free, high-performance web server, you've taken away the most of the potential benefits. As a reference, you can see the current pricing structure for Caddy here: https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing Note that the limited time introductory price is still more expensive over a year than paying a consultant for a couple of days to tweak NGINX.
        AndyNemmity 9y ago
        That doesn't look more expensive than consultant, looks less. That's what I'm saying, if anything I think they may have underpriced that cost. That's way cheaper than most support options I've seen.
ForHackernews 9y ago
For some reason lots of companies are paying for Slack, even though it's basically IRC-plus-emoji, and easily replaced by any of a dozen other chat platforms. Is it because it's user-facing instead of an infrastructure component?
- detaro 9y ago
  Hosted services are compared differently. And I think among those Slack won for now due to a combination of better UX, free intro tier and luck.
rocqua 9y ago
This seems like a pretty canonical example of "Subtle emotional manipulation based on a misconception" except maybe not subtle. To quote from the article: > This was the worst part of this experience, and is akin to abuse. Demands or demanding comments stem from the misconception that users are entitled to FOSS. This behavior also stems from a misconception, but a different one: that open source maintainers depend on, or need, their open source projects. For most maintainers or project owners, this is FALSE! > snip > as well as any comment insinuating that the maintainer is reliant upon a project that is not profitable or sustainable. Here’s the brutal truth for 99.9% (* not an actual figure) of open source projects, folks: you (the user of an open source project) need and rely on the project more than the maintainers do. Do not make the mistake of thinking that maintainers are emotionally tied to their projects. Definitely don’t call it their ‘baby’.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  There are three lemonade stands. Two of them are giving away free lemonade; the third is giving away a free lecture about why I shouldn't feel so entitled to free lemonade alongside charging me for theirs. Who's really confused about the economics of this situation?
  - rocqua 9y ago
    You are angry about someone else making a mistake in your eyes. His mistake (people moving away from his product) doesn't affect you, so your essentially drinking poison to spite someone else. Alternatively, you think things should be free and get angry when people want to get something for their efforts.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    That doesn't really have anything to do with GP, right? I feel like this is a maybe-true comment on the link in general, but not the post you're replying to: entitlement/general nastiness towards open source maintainers is very common, as is the misconception about their degrees of commitment to their projects. That's true whether or not a project switches to a paid model, and whether or not maintainers post what you refer to as "lectures".

rapsey 9y ago

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. A lot of the time experts don't see a market before someone makes a business out of it. It's obviously not going to be the next big IPO. If he can make some money back for his time however, good for him. If his project is useless, people would not get so upset.

fusiongyro 9y ago
You miss 100% of shots you make when you aim away from the basket with no ball in your hands too. There is a market for his product. Nginx and Apache already own that market. His differentiator is being easy to install. Puppet et. al. solve ease-of-use for large corporations with the budget. The niche that cares about being easy to install is the niche with no money and nobody to pawn it off on. That niche is also passionate and loud. If he could make some money back for his time, he would already have had a business here. This business idea is essentially selling pre-made cardboard signs to the homeless. If they have the money, they aren't homeless; if they don't, well, they already make their own signs.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "His differentiator is being easy to install." Not just easy to install. Easy to install, maintain and extend. Those properties clearly have value, not just for those who can't afford to pay licence costs. The idea there's no market for Caddy is clearly false. As referenced in the linked article, there are already uses of it in commercial organisations, something you're suggesting can't possibly exist as "Nginx and Apache already own that market". The only criticisms I'd make is that the price is too high (in my opinion) and there should've been prior warning given before switching to a paid model, so that companies could budget for it in advance. However, that doesn't mean they won't have paying customers. Note that they've already got commercial sponsors.
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    Price being too high is an interesting question. I've found that people willing to pay, will pay a high price. You don't really gain anything putting it any lower. Those that want it free or else stay the same. Maybe others have different experiences...
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Consider what's cheaper, paying for Caddy under its current pricing structure or paying for a consultant to configure NGINX? If the key selling point of Caddy is that it makes web hosting easier to manage, but you can get around that cost by paying a one-off cost for someone to set up a free, high-performance web server, you've taken away the most of the potential benefits. As a reference, you can see the current pricing structure for Caddy here: https://caddyserver.com/pricing https://caddyserver.com/pricing Note that the limited time introductory price is still more expensive over a year than paying a consultant for a couple of days to tweak NGINX.
      - AndyNemmity 9y ago
        That doesn't look more expensive than consultant, looks less. That's what I'm saying, if anything I think they may have underpriced that cost. That's way cheaper than most support options I've seen.

ForHackernews 9y ago

For some reason lots of companies are paying for Slack, even though it's basically IRC-plus-emoji, and easily replaced by any of a dozen other chat platforms. Is it because it's user-facing instead of an infrastructure component?

detaro 9y ago
Hosted services are compared differently. And I think among those Slack won for now due to a combination of better UX, free intro tier and luck.

rocqua 9y ago

This seems like a pretty canonical example of "Subtle emotional manipulation based on a misconception" except maybe not subtle. To quote from the article: > This was the worst part of this experience, and is akin to abuse. Demands or demanding comments stem from the misconception that users are entitled to FOSS. This behavior also stems from a misconception, but a different one: that open source maintainers depend on, or need, their open source projects. For most maintainers or project owners, this is FALSE! > snip > as well as any comment insinuating that the maintainer is reliant upon a project that is not profitable or sustainable. Here’s the brutal truth for 99.9% (* not an actual figure) of open source projects, folks: you (the user of an open source project) need and rely on the project more than the maintainers do. Do not make the mistake of thinking that maintainers are emotionally tied to their projects. Definitely don’t call it their ‘baby’.

fusiongyro 9y ago
There are three lemonade stands. Two of them are giving away free lemonade; the third is giving away a free lecture about why I shouldn't feel so entitled to free lemonade alongside charging me for theirs. Who's really confused about the economics of this situation?
- rocqua 9y ago
  You are angry about someone else making a mistake in your eyes. His mistake (people moving away from his product) doesn't affect you, so your essentially drinking poison to spite someone else. Alternatively, you think things should be free and get angry when people want to get something for their efforts.
- zbentley 9y ago
  That doesn't really have anything to do with GP, right? I feel like this is a maybe-true comment on the link in general, but not the post you're replying to: entitlement/general nastiness towards open source maintainers is very common, as is the misconception about their degrees of commitment to their projects. That's true whether or not a project switches to a paid model, and whether or not maintainers post what you refer to as "lectures".